Custom V2 Square Banks & Pencil Holders

Custom pencil holders are very much coming to SandboxRanch.com, they can and are essentially made to the same spec as our hardwood banks, square or rounded ones, so they are a perfect fit production wise.

I’ve been wanting to make custom pencil holders from the very beginning of SandboxRanch.com, there is so much design wise that can be made on that aspect of our product range alone that it’s just as infinite as our banking options and even our coinage possibilities.

As I get more and more experience designing items that can be made on-order with the slabs of wood I make in the shop for just this purpose, there are always voids or spots not being used best and that’s where having other products that are smaller works out great for customers and SandboxRanch.com alike.

I want to offer SandboxRanch.com customers absolute flexibility with their designs regarding what we are producing for them, and that means sometimes we make banks that are 12″ or even 16″ tall which can leave some rather large areas that are too small for other banks but large enough for custom pencil holders and other smaller items I’ve got in the works.

End-to-end control of every aspect of production from the slab sizing to the finishing on the banks and other items means the more efficient I can be, especially when it comes to optimizing the designs being made in this very important CNC router stage, the better it is for the long term viability of SandboxRanch.com.

I’ve been making various types of pen and pencil holders through the years, here’s one I made for my parents a while back for their birthday.

The pen and pencil holders that I made in this production run of V2 square hardwood banks is a perfect example of space optimization, I had a small area that no bank could have gone into but I was able to produce two holder prototypes to see how my ideas come to fruition in real life.

You’ll also notice the imagery that I’m now producing for these blog posts and the video has a lot more contrast now, decided to play things up a bit on the visual front to make things pop a bit more after noticing most of my stuff looks rather flat, probably due to the awful lighting in my shop, hopefully this counteracts a bit of that.

The reason for re-envisioning the custom square banks on offer at SandboxRanch.com was to be able to offer customers the culmination of a year of design through fabrication experience into the revised design, you can only make so many slight modifications to a design before you need to really redo it completely, and like my custom round banks, the square banks were due for a major refresh as well.

The custom square banks for this run were all perfect right out of the gate, I will of course do a few slight modifications to the design, as I did with the previous ones, in order to produce a better product but it’s light years over the old ones in my opinion in both storage capacity and overall aesthetics.

Back when I use to sell digital files, here’s one of my pen and pencil holder designs animated in 3D.

and another

When I made my very first batch of custom banks, the one below in the video where I produced mostly scrap for the fire pit, it was the first time I laminated sticks through tried to make tight designs like these, so the past year has really opened my eyes and given me a ton of experience on these fronts that I’m able to fully utilize with this V2.

It continues to blow my mind just how much of a journey I’ve been on with just these banks over the past year, so much has changed in such a small piece of time!

As for the custom pencil holders, the same experience I used for the banks is being applied directly to that, there are many things that I think about when it comes to making the best pencil holders in the world but before actually designing through fabricating it in my shop, you really don’t know the nuances of such a simple upcoming SandboxRanch.com product.

For these custom V2 square banks and essentially V1 pencil holders, you’ll notice they are being made at the same time using the same slab, this is on purpose, so I can mix and match designs, including the rounded banks, regardless of size, into one production at a time, meaning one slab can “satisfy” many orders at once rather than having to make one slab for one product at a time.

I have started to keep minimal inventory for SandboxRanch.com and will soon be offering quick-ship options as well, truth be told, not everybody wants to play with the nuances that are their banks and holders, as such, here’s what you get, here’s the price and it’s at your door a few days later has advantages rather than waiting for a slab to be filled with orders before proceeding to make a production run of it.

There are lots of ways to keep a desk organized, here’s a card holder I did a few years back for an idea.

More often that not, I’ve had customers NOT order a custom bank because the birthday or event was within a day or two of them discovering SandboxRanch.com, as such, yes, we offer next-day shipping, but it’s still faster than a few days to glue a slab together, router it out, make the acrylic front then package it for shipping.

You can see the custom pencil holders in the bottom right of this slab, after using these for a bit, I realized the error of my ways and will be adding internal slots to keep pencils upright, even if you only have a few, these are BIG and the current design just lets the pencils fall into these custom pencil holder bottoms, making them hard to retrieve.

Another “new” design that I’ve been wanting to make for a while is the new skull bank now available on SandboxRanch.com, it really showcases just how much customization is possible not only in the shape of the wood but the acrylic engraving possible as well.

This production run of custom V2 square banks and custom pencil holders came out great, they are bigger by an inch, as mentioned in the video at the top of this blog post, in order to proportionally increase the amount of volume inside the banks as so much is lost in the squariness of the overall style of these, it was the only solution I could think of.

Just looking at the almost finished V2 square banks above, I can see an immediate change in the D, I’ve since made that middle part thicker as the screw works fine at this thickness but to make sure that isn’t luck, having more material will make sure it’s less prone to splitting, producing a sub-par generational bank at SandboxRanch.com!

As with the V2 square banks, the custom pencil holders also have a skin to keep them in place during production, as such, this must be routed off after they have been individually cut out of the slab I made a few days ago, the ongoing theme here at SandboxRanch.com is that things take time and the steps involved over the past year have increased but they have also become more efficient and as a result, produce a better final result for the customer.

I plan to also release lots of other custom to order items on SandboxRanch.com as it keeps evolving beyond just woodworking, but that will always be the foundational product for me.

Once all the hardwood products are finished being “finished” without a finish, it’s time to cut out the acrylic front, as these are all initially going to be photographed, I want a consistent look on our website so they will all have the same spec, this will be updated shortly thereafter to take into account customer variations and requirements.

We use our laser to cut the acrylic, our router to carve out the wood and lots of power and hand tools to put it all together to make a finished product, truth be told, the only real difference between a custom square bank (in this case) and a custom pencil holder is the size of the slot, coins have a far smaller one to contain the coins if gravity ever gets reversed, with pencils, it doesn’t really matter.

I really enjoy the entire process of bringing these custom banks to life, they all have such a distinctive texture and grain pattern, each is unique like a snowflake and it’s fun getting feedback from SandboxRanch.com customers how these are by far the best custom banks they’ve ever layed eyes on and got the pleasure to use.

Don’t forget, I also have 3D kits on SandboxRanch.com to make rather unique banks too.

The mating process is relatively straight forward, the masking is kept on the acrylic until the very last moment to prevent scratching, these banks will be tagged and shipped after they are photographed at the shop and individually branded!

In this production run, being the first time I bring these V2 square banks into existence, there were a few minor issues that were as much wood related as they were design, so those were fixed so that the next batch of those banks, you guessed it, will be even better than this already awesome batch was for SandboxRanch.com customers!

Need custom hardwood banks and custom pencil holders? You are at the right place!